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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24280609">lavender and lace</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina'>firstaudrina</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Little Women (2019), Little Women Series - Louisa May Alcott</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-03 01:14:45</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,703</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24280609</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/firstaudrina/pseuds/firstaudrina</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Jo shows Friedrich the turret.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Friedrich Bhaer/Josephine March</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>16</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>74</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>lavender and lace</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This diverges from film canon during Friedrich's visit to the March house, before the umbrella.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The music fades out under Friedrich’s fingers. The instrument’s the same, but he doesn’t play like Beth did; the piano was the surest way for her to make her soft little voice heard and it provided much greater variation than speaking. When she was at the keys, the piano could be merry or somber, sometimes a tinkling tune and other times a dizzying cacophony that wound its way through every room of the small house. “I’m going to tell every instructor who criticized my dedication that there’s no accounting for natural talent,” Laurie remarked once, and Beth blushed, but there was confidence in the way she played that could never be expressed in words. And she did it purely for the pleasure of it. There was no other reason. Simple joy.</p>
<p>The way Friedrich plays is calm and contained. He keeps his eyes on the keys and gives particular attention to every note. It reminds Jo of Beth. Not Beth the musician, but Beth the girl, with a gentle musicality under the surface like fish in a placid lake. Like Beth, he plays for them, but plays for himself too. It makes the sound of it a little removed, almost private.  </p>
<p>When Beth took ill again, Jo was struck by how little she knew of her sister outside herself. She had been shocked that Beth could come to a tumultuous understanding of her inevitable death when Jo only knew how to push against change until it buckled. There was a knotty guilt inside her over how much of Beth she’d paid a blind eye to, and she feels a poignant echo of that now, looking at Friedrich at the piano. She spent weeks watching him at the boarding house before they ever spoke, prickling with how much she wanted to know and afraid of what that knowing might mean.</p>
<p>She’s caught off guard by the stopping of the music, Friedrich saying, “My own sister passed, oh…” There is a slight difficulty in the number. “Two years ago, now. I know a reminder can bring as much solace as sorrow.”</p>
<p>Jo’s breath catches in her throat. “Yes.”</p>
<p>They’d spoken of his nephews, and in broad terms why the boys were in his care, but she never thought of it as him having his own Beth — now gone.</p>
<p>“I get a start every time I walk past her bed,” Meg confesses softly. </p>
<p>Amy adds, “And those dolls in their baskets.” Rescued from the scrap heap by their kind-hearted sister, and now lost without their protector again. </p>
<p>Immediately after Beth went, Jo almost couldn’t stand the sight of her little trunk in the turret with her name painted on it so carefully by Amy, filled with pressed and dried flowers, hand-stitched doll clothes, and sheaves of music. “All her things in the attic.”</p>
<p>They hold it for a moment, all of them. Then Amy says, “You ought to show him the garret.”</p>
<p>“Oh,” Jo says, suddenly embarrassed in an odd way about their personal playhouse, the small jewel she holds in her heart and can’t show to anyone. “Oh, I don’t —"</p>
<p>“He should get to meet all of us March girls,” Amy says. “Even if some of us are no longer here. And no longer Marches.”</p>
<p>In Amy, Jo sees that same tentative want that had greeted her at their reunion, a desire to hold fast to a sister in the face of everything that might pull them apart. Amy pushes, but it comes from her heart. </p>
<p>“If you want,” Friedrich says, which is better to Jo than if he’d said <i>if you like</i>, because it’s predicated entirely on her. Only if <i>she</i> wants.</p>
<p>“Yes, I think Amy’s right,” Jo says. “You should. If only to — there’s a portrait there, I think. Would you? Like to see what she looked like?”</p>
<p>He nods. “I’d like nothing more.”</p>
<p>Jo ignores the traded glances and silent communication of her surrounding family. Normally that might serve to make her very cross, but she’s too tangled up with nerves from Friedrich standing so close to her, just a skirt’s width away as he follows her up the stairs and up the stairs again. To a place that’s Jo’s heart as much as her actual heart is.</p>
<p>She despairs that it no longer looks so cheery as it once did. The decorations have been unpinned and boxed up, the viscera of girlhood relegated to memory. Their costumes were put away, not readily available for grasping hands but waiting for the day when Meg’s children, or Amy’s, will eagerly reach for them instead. The art supplies and sewing tools are gone. There’s only the old couch and Jo’s writing desk with its burned-down candles and half-dried pots of ink. Her jacket and cap. It looks clean and tidy. It looks like a place to store old things.</p>
<p>Jo is brisk now, unwilling to look at Friedrich lest his response be one she doesn’t want to see. “This was our palace as girls, if you can imagine — Meg got the idea to turn it into some Turkish tent from a book and we nailed old curtains to the ceiling, but they just gathered dust and dropped spiders on us. We could do as we liked up here and we made newspapers and wore top hats and played at being princesses and counts and poisoners —"</p>
<p>The relentless buzz of her voice falters, and he says, “Like your stories.”</p>
<p>“Yes, I —” Jo touches the cuff of her old writing coat. “I suppose.” </p>
<p>Her resolve wavers. She looks at Friedrich and finds him smiling, small and private as a song.</p>
<p>Jo immediately launches off, jangling. “I’m sure we have one of Amy’s old portraits around here —” She attacks a stack of canvases, but they’re just amateur landscapes. “We were going to take a photograph once, you know, a real one. Before Father left for the war. The whole thing quite terrified Beth.” Jo pauses in her frantic search, fists on cocked hips. “Now I rather wish we’d done it anyway.”</p>
<p>“I have one little picture of my sister, before she died.”</p>
<p>Jo turns in time to see him take a small paperback book from the pocket of his coat, well-worn and likely well-loved, of German poetry. He slips the bookmark free and holds it out for Jo. It’s a carte-de-visite, faintly yellow with some age and frayed at the corners from a life in books. The girl in it is shockingly young and looks like him, with deep-set dark eyes and straight brows, an angular nose above a small curving mouth, and copious dark hair barely held up in its knot. Just a girl, and now a ghost. “She’s very pretty.”</p>
<p>“She wore our family’s face better than I do,” he jokes, but Jo doesn’t know about that. She finds his face grows finer the more she looks at it.</p>
<p>“You keep her with you, in your book.” Jo reaches for the small book of poetry, though there’s hesitance in Friedrich as he gives it up. She understands; they’re precious things. It’s in the trade that another small scrap pokes from its pages. When Jo pulls it free, she blinks in surprise. It’s an anonymous poem cut from the paper. But it’s not anonymous for Jo.</p>
<p>There’s worry, or perhaps nervousness, in the crease of his brow. “I can think of no better place for someone one loves, than in books.”</p>
<p>It’s Jo’s poem. She’d sold it ages ago for a few pennies and while there was no name in the byline, there would be no mistaking the author for someone who knew even the scantest details of her life. “How do you have this?”</p>
<p>“I found it by chance,” he says. “I knew it right away.”</p>
<p>Jo hadn’t expected the poem to be accepted when she sent it out amongst an armada of other offerings. <i>In the Garret</i> was a sentimental thing, but as her eyes race over the words again, standing here in the empty attic, she feels an especial pang that brings tears to her eyes. Instead of showing how she feels, she laughs gruffly and declares, “It’s very bad poetry, I don’t know why you kept it.”</p>
<p>She almost wants to tear it up and let the pieces fall to the old floorboards, but she tucks it back where she found it. Then she returns the book to Friedrich so he can restore the photograph of his sister to its resting place. Once accomplished, he puts the book back in his pocket.</p>
<p>“I kept it because it’s yours,” he says. “Because when I read it, I felt — I felt like I was seeing something of you. Something obscured.”</p>
<p>Jo escaped in writing, but in that silly little poem she’d only said things as they were. She cried when she wrote it and wanted it gone when it was done, happy to exchange her pain for pennies. To think that had been the thing he kept — the part of herself so full of sorrow and loneliness, so shameful, that hurt so much.</p>
<p>The only man they’d ever let up here was Laurie, but he was more like another sister than a proper boy, and he’d been so willing to be enveloped by them. The space holds Friedrich differently, his somber self in a rumpled suit, his wild hair; the shape of him against the beams not quite fitting but disturbing nothing. His eyes saying more than Jo thought she was ready to hear. She has a strange urge to get one of Beth’s hair ribbons from her box and make him put it in his book, too.</p>
<p>Jo asks, “Will you come again tomorrow?”</p>
<p>He doesn’t expect that. He pauses, and there’s an awkwardness to how he holds himself that’s at odds with the man from the dance hall, the entertainer of boarding house children who crawled around on hands and knees playing at whatever their fancy was. She recognizes herself in it. Wanting, but not knowing how to want, or how the want will be answered. “Yes,” he says. “If you want to see me, I’ll come.”</p>
<p>Jo spent so many weeks looking at him. She hasn’t seen enough. “Come again tomorrow.”</p>
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